Watching News Corp pretend to care about children is like watching a drunk driver try to stick to the road rules. Although, drunks can try to claim diminished responsibility. News Corp knows exactly what it’s doing.
Its current campaign, Let Them Be Kids, complete with petition and a parade of stories about the evils of social media, claims “A generation of children is being lost to the billion-dollar social media giants because they are putting profits before people. In Australia, youth suicide and mental health rates are skyrocketing … Experts say that is because of a fundamental change in the lives of children in the last 10 years — the utter explosion of social media use.” News Corp claims there’s a “need to increase the age for social media access in Australia to 16.”
In fact, youth suicide has fallen sharply since 2020, according to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (as it has for young adults too). And some experts — the “experts” quoted by News Corp are nearly all conservative activists, not academics — connect social media use and suicide and other mental illnesses. But they do so mainly on gut feel — the hard evidence is mixed around links between social media and youth suicide. And if social media is so central to youth suicide, it’s peculiar that suicide rates of 15 to 24-year-olds were more than twice as high in the internet-less 1980s and 1990s compared to the worst year of recent times, 2020.
Facts aren’t a strong point for News Corp, as we know, but hypocrisy is. There’s not much in the way of “let them be kids” sentiment at News Corp if the kids are Indigenous, as story after story after story about Indigenous youth “crime waves” shows. And a media company that is avowedly climate denialist and which has worked to demonise climate action, politicians that espouse climate action and promote fossil fuels is hardly in a position to pose as a defender of kids, given News Corp and Rupert Murdoch have ensured they will inherit a much hotter planet with more extreme weather and a poorer economy. There was never much “let them be kids” generosity in News Corp’s long-running smear campaign against Greta Thunberg (oops, sorry, “miserable little doom goblin“) or toward kids engaging in climate protests.
And given News Corp’s relentless campaigning against Labor’s negative gearing changes in 2019, one of the few policy measures that would have materially improved housing affordability for younger Australians, the pose of defending the interests of kids is risible. News Corp is a media outlet for angry old white men who think they’re the biggest victims in society and whose primary enjoyment in life is punching downward at anyone different to them. “Let Them Be Kids”? Only if they get off my lawn, shut up about climate change and push my property values up.
As Crikey has pointed out a few times, the campaign from Australia’s dying corporate media against social media companies is entirely driven by terror that tech giants do advertising far better than media companies ever can, driving firms like News Corp, Nine and the terminal Seven West Media to do what they do best — push government for regulatory favours to limit their competition. In this case, it also helps that the Coalition has embraced age verification for social media — as has the South Australian Labor government — meaning News Corp can cheerlead for its favoured political party as well.
In practical terms, any age verification system, whether imposed directly on platforms or operated via a third-party site that purports to provide age verification “tokens”, is a privacy nightmare, in which Facebook or Twitter or TikTok users would be required to hand over identity documents to prove they’re over 16.
Most likely, social media companies would simply refuse to accept the burden of collecting such a huge trove of personal data — one that would have both private and state-sponsored hackers licking their lips — and vetting millions of such documents. They’d either defy the government to force them to collect such it or limit access to their platforms from Australia. That would be good news for VPN providers, who could confidently look forward to millions more Australians getting one to route around the damage from our global village idiot status.
Of course, the age verification issue doesn’t stop with Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Australia’s internet censorship body, the eSafety Commission — now wholly discredited after losing its attempt to dictate to the entire planet what people should be allowed to see online — wants to impose age verification on all “adult sites”.
Given it’s less than a decade since News Corp publications in the UK were printing photos of topless models in family newspapers, the definition of an “adult site” could be pretty flexible. Given nearly as many Australians use online pornography as use social media — over 80% of men and over half of women — does News Corp also want Australians to be handing pictures of their passports, driver’s licences and credit cards to PornHub? As the likes of the latter have argued, the only likely consequence of imposing such silly and easily circumvented restrictions would be to drive some users to more sinister sites that have no interest in complying with any Australian law.
Not that any of that matters to News Corp. This is about moral posturing and demonising a competitor. But the stench of hypocrisy emanating from the company is more than usually odious.
For anyone seeking help, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, and Beyond Blue is on 1300 22 4636. To speak to a First Nations crisis supporter, call 13 YARN (13 9276). In an emergency, call 000.
